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So I read today's post about what it is that brings people to your blog. And I have to say, this is something I've been thinking about a lot over the last year or two since I discovered it, that is, what keeps bringing me back to it. 

Originally it was something to do with sexuality, to be sure, though not in the sense of grabbing a quick look at Sasha Grey's snatch (not that it isn't, um, pretty). It's got more to do with that borderzone where sexuality bleeds into the other areas of our lives and beings, the way sexual desire colors our emotions, our relations, and, in some distant way, what it is we write about. (I say "we" both in a general sense and, more specifically as a would be/never was writer). It's like this ambivalent space that can be both threatening and utterly honest (which I suppose is threatening in its own way). It's that personal space of honesty and dishonesty that I think initially drew me to your pages regularly if infrequently.

There's been this majorly (my word, don't complain) subtle change that's occurred in the shift from The Reverse Cowgirl to the Susannah Breslin blog. It feels like something's been lost. Not in the writing, but in whatever part of you it comes out of. The words now feel like they emerge from a box on a floor in an empty building, if that makes sense. It's not an issue of immediacy; it's like now you're suddenly trying to write, and in doing so penning yourself in. (Just saw the pun; unintended but good). Better, it's like the brief glimpse you get of the mannequin with her mouth clapped shut before you're re-directed from the Reverse Cowgirl URL.  

Reading the RC, I used to wonder if your writerly ambition felt trapped by having written about the porn-industry. It felt like there was an overhanging, understated sense of anxiety. And it used to make me think what happens if, as a writer, you get too firmly pegged to an ambivalent, out-of-the-mainstream subject by inclination and by your audience's expectations. I wondered which had to be accommodated. It's a problem I deal with (in a way different context), and it's one of the things that drew (and still draws) me to your blog, trying to see if it gets resolved, hoping it my lend me inspiration to resolve my own variation on the theme. 

I haven't had those feelings with the new blog until your post on The Anxiety of Influence. That was something new, unexpected, and surprising. A different part of your writer-you appeared that seems a more natural progression from the RC. (At a personal level it resonated, too, because of the nexus of art, fathers, death, and the Irish-Catholic New York of the last century). 

At any rate, that's why I go to your blogs. Thanks for them. 

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